Hay Festival, Segovia: David Vann on Jack London

David Vann is celebrated for his exquisite novels set in the frozen north.
Here he pays tribute to the savage, primordial imagination of Jack London,
whose ‘The Call of the Wild’ is the greatest Alaskan novel of all time.

By David Vann

4:08PM BST 15 Sep 2011

Alaska. The last frontier. This frozen north, this wilderness, is where we put our dreams. Only an unknown place can hold dreams. Any known place would be too small, and inevitably corrupted. We might escape to Alaska some day, and if we did, we would “buck up”, find our truer, better selves, our goodness, our connection to nature. We would belong, finally, no longer outcasts from our selves and our lives and each other and the world.

I was born in Alaska and spent my early childhood there, but I believed the myth of it as fiercely as anyone, because I had been torn from it at the age of five or six, taken down to California as my parents divorced. And so Alaska was the land of my father, the land taken from me, and I spent vacations there with him, and I dreamed of the place, even when I was there.

The rainforest at the edges of Ketchikan grew so thick with undergrowth and deadfall I would sometimes fall through the apparent forest floor to the real floor beneath. Always these two levels to Alaska, and I could disappear entirely when I fell. I always felt watched in that forest, hunted, and there were signs everywhere of wolves and bears, track and spoor. An atavistic threat that could materialise at any moment, civilisation and its protections and comforts and promises all fallen away.

Even the plants seemed primordial. Waxy bright flower stalks in deep purples and reds, fungal growths peering down like warped, creamy faces from the trunks of trees, wide fans of nettles defying gravity, setting up their own perfect horizontal planes above my head and ready to sting, ferns ancient, grown thick. It was a place where you could only run. Or stop suddenly to listen in fear to the pounding of your own blood, and then run again.

This is the forest Jack London evokes at the end of The Call of the Wild, the forest into which the wolf Buck runs, following the call.

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What surprises me most is that the real Alaska can bear the weight of the myth. You can still walk 500 miles in one direction in Alaska and find no other human, no road, no cabin. You can die variously along the way, and there will be no help. You can walk through a forest that has never been clear-cut. This is true wilderness. But it has no meaning on its own. A walk in this wilderness does not, in fact, bring us back in time or bring us closer to our truer or better selves, and this is where myth comes in, this is where Jack London becomes important.

My idea of Alaska, my memories of my childhood there, and even my own idea of myself now, owe something to London’s writing about the north. That’s an amazing thing, the reach of a popular writer 100 years later.

London was not a literary writer. He was a popular writer, a mythmaker, a genius at what James Baldwin called the “concerted surrender to distortion”. He was not well educated, but he was an expert at divining what people really wanted. “I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity laid down by all authorities on the art of the short story.”

What rings true to a mass audience is rarely truth, of course, but more often desire. London provided who we might be, who we should be in a better world, our goodness and our resourcefulness when tested, and also our connection to nature and our atavistic selves.

American ideas of nature come helplessly from the British Romantics, filtered through the American Transcendentalists, but it’s in the British writers, such as William Blake, that we find the ideas of our relation to nature and hopes for ourselves most clearly expressed.

Our imagination, as an innate faculty, is connected to nature, and is a true perception of nature. Blake’s project was to burn away the adult Mind of Experience, which limits our perceptions, so that we can be released into the Mind of Innocence, this true apprehension of nature. Blake did this using corrosives, “printing in the infernal method” in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He illustrated his poems using metal plates and corrosive acid, the method mirroring the subject, aiming to burn away experience to display “the infinite which was hid”.

This belief in the inherent goodness of humanity is at the heart of all nature writing. In recent American nature writing there's a nod to the “child self” or some other way of invoking what the British Romantics called the “genial springs”. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) Annie Dillard tells us “an infant who has just learnt to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment”.

Dillard takes on this “bewilderment” as her project, but I’m not sure this innocence can be equated with goodness. I think if we burn away civilisation we might find Lord of the Flies. Our inherent nature could be barbarity, or what London calls “the law of club and fang”, and one reason I’m interested in The Call of the Wild is there’s an uneasiness in London. What do we find, really, if we go back in time, if we imagine ourselves back to our prehistory?

Jack London was the highest-paid writer in the world in his day, the J K Rowling of the time, and Buck’s tale is oddly similar to Harry Potter’s in that it’s essentially a coronation story. The tale is about the theft of Buck’s nobility and his return to it, just as Harry Potter’s is about him slowly discovering the noble birth that had previously been hidden from him.

Buck has an easy, cultured life in California, in the home of a judge, a place ordered, rational, and fair (at least to those at the top of the social scale). As the story begins, we’re told that “over this great demesne Buck ruled”.

His fall occurs at the hands of the vilified weak and evil brown hordes, here represented by Manuel, a gardener’s helper who has “numerous progeny” and loves Chinese lottery. On “the memorable night of Manuel’s treachery” Buck is kidnapped and taken on a journey which will see him beaten and sold into slavery. Along the way, he’ll fight back, of course, with “the unbridled anger of a kidnapped king” but a slave he will become for a long time.

What’s odd about The Call of the Wild is that we don’t really end on goodness. Instead, in the final pages Buck is “the Evil Spirit” to be feared forever by the Yeehats, a kind of dog Grendel, a monster lurking at the edges of civilisation, threatening to drag one of us away at any moment.

This is a curious place for nature writing or a coronation story to end. No goodness, our hero is not even human, and we’ve returned to something like our earliest monster.

Buck has learnt from his first moments in Alaska that you must strike quickly and lethally or lose your life. He has only one final attachment to humanity, one man, John Thornton, whom he loves with abandon.

But those nasty savages, the brown hordes, intrude again, as they do whenever things are getting good and noble. The Yeehats murder John along with everyone else, and so Buck slashes their throats, and it’s in this action, finally separated from all humanity, that Buck transits fully into “the law of club and fang” and becomes a Grendel.

The penultimate paragraph does provide a portrait of Buck as king, “a great, gloriously coated wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves”. But he’s portrayed in a tableau that includes sacks of gold that humans will never claim, overrun by vegetation, by the wild. He can be seen leading the pack, “leaping gigantic above his fellows”, so he’s a king among wolves, but how are we humans supposed to read him? The hero is a dog, but aren’t animal heroes supposed to become stand-ins for ourselves by the end?

Like most writers of popular fiction, London is used by convention and doesn’t seem to be aware of the implications of his own text. He is sometimes out of control, throwing up various tropes and clichés, cultural narratives and desires borrowed widely, even plagiarising from another dog book, without much consistency. And there’s something fascinating about the result, something unconsciously great about a coronation story written by a communist, a story in which a dog is both king and Grendel, a killer of savages who romanticises primitive man, nature writing that fails to end in goodness. London offers something oddly thrilling amid the mess, perhaps simply because the unconscious itself is interesting and a writer so out of control can hide nothing from us. The fact The Call of the Wild was the most popular work of its time proves, I think, that something worth reflection is happening in this text.

London is one of the writers we read to understand America, a country which itself is perpetually out of control, with no understanding of what it’s doing or what it means. I can’t celebrate the romantic ideas or the killing of savages in this book. But I can say I’m fascinated by it and that I find it worth going back to. It’s a story which has gained its own life and will probably be with us for as long as we’re reading books. London captures the contradictions in America’s frontier dream of itself, killing off the savages and then wanting to be like them, wanting to return to their older world.

* This is an edited version of the introduction to The Call of the Wild by Jack London, published by The Folio Society. It can be purchased at www.foliosociety.com, by calling 020 7400 4200 or by visiting The Folio Society Bookshop, 44 Eagle Street, London WC1R 4FS.

* The Hay Festival Segovia takes place from September 22 to 25. David Vann will be talking about his new book, Caribou Island, on September 24 at 5pm. Other highlights include David Mitchell, Javier Marías and Arturo Pérez-Reverte